Ring, Amazon's smart doorbell maker, ended its partnership with Flock Safety, a police surveillance tech company, following a Super Bowl ad that sparked concerns about a "dystopian surveillance society," according to Fortune. The announcement, which did not directly cite the ad as the reason for the decision, comes amid growing scrutiny of surveillance technology and its potential impact on privacy.
The 30-second Ring ad, which aired during the Super Bowl, featured a lost dog being found through a network of cameras. This prompted a backlash and raised fears about the potential for widespread surveillance. However, the feature highlighted in the ad, called Search Party, was not related to Flock Safety. Ring and Flock had previously announced plans to collaborate, allowing Ring camera owners to share video footage with law enforcement through Ring's Community Requests feature. "Following a comprehensive review, we determine," the companies stated in a joint announcement, though the specifics of the review were not disclosed.
In other tech news, the Vim project announced the release of Vim 9.2, bringing significant enhancements to the Vim9 scripting language, improved diff mode, and comprehensive completion features, according to Hacker News. The new version includes support for fuzzy matching during insert-mode completion and the ability to complete words directly from registers. Furthermore, Vim 9.2 offers full support for the Wayland UI and clipboard, along with adherence to the XDG Base Directory Specification on Linux and Unix-like systems.
Meanwhile, the AI industry saw a shakeup with the release of MiniMax's new M2.5 language model, according to VentureBeat. The Chinese AI startup, headquartered in Shanghai, released two variants of the model, promising to make high-end artificial intelligence more affordable. The model was made open source on Hugging Face under a modified MIT License. This license requires that those using the model for commercial purposes "prominently display 'MiniMax M2.5' on the user interface of such product or service."
Also, developers are already running OpenClaw at home, according to VentureBeat. Censys tracked the open-source AI agent from roughly 1,000 instances to over 21,000 publicly exposed deployments in under a week. Bitdefenders GravityZone telemetry confirmed the pattern security leaders feared: employees deploying OpenClaw on corporate machines with single-line install commands, granting autonomous agents shell access, file system privileges, and OAuth tokens to Slack, Gmail, and SharePoint.
Finally, for those seeking alternatives to Google's Android operating system, there are options, according to Wired. While an iPhone is an alternative, it may not be the best choice for those seeking to distance themselves from tech giants. Several projects aim to remove Google and its services from the system, though most are based on Android rather than being entirely separate operating systems.
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